Heroes to zeroes: Finland the eco-list darling joins the rank and vile
COMMENTARY
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By William Moore
Personally I blame David Wallechinsky and Irving and Amy Wallace. It's either them or the person who thought up Desert Island Discs for BBC Radio.
Wallechinsky and the Wallaces were the people who lifted list-making from the realm of the bar-room discussion and put it between the covers of a 1977 book called - unsurprisingly - The Book of Lists.
Until then, the passion for making lists was restricted to the mainly male inhabitants of public bars, who would wrestle with important questions like "Who was the best centre-forward never to play for his country?", "What are the five seminal rock albums from the past 40 years to have in your vinyl collection?", or "Which seven Hollywood babes would you wish to be stranded with on a desert island?".
After the book came out, it seems all hell broke loose. Now every organisation under the sun wants to rank countries. Apparently it is also a good means of raising awareness - and funds.
This past week was, for me at least, a list too far.
We Finns were told first that we were #1 in press freedom (hooray!), then we were soundly whipped for being the third-worst in the world for ecological profligacy (oops!), and finally we got the so-so news that we were the 6th happiest bunch on the planet, according to Business Week.
Huh? Happiness!? What the hell? When did THAT become scientifically measurable?
It is not as though this list-mania has not been going on for some time. Over the last couple of years, the collective Finnish ego has been massaged in all the right places by studies that have shown our superiority in things like competitiveness, lack of corruption, educational efficiency and PISA scores, and even environmental sustainability, in all of which we took top spot or at least got among the medals.
But hang on a second, what was that last one again?
Environmental sustainability? Oh yes, that was a measure of our excellence in the stewardship of our natural resources, courtesy of researchers at Yale and Columbia, in January 2005.
And yet the WWF Living Planet Report just last week caned us for being third only to the UAE and the United States in the size of our ecological footprint.
Good little Finland goes bad, or what?
Let's back up a little and consider the nature of these apparently ubiquitous global ranking exercises. They have become almost a sporting discipline. They do not appear in arcane journals like Global Ecologists' Monthly or Education Policy Quarterly or even the World Happiness Newsletter, but on the pages of mainstream tabloids and broadsheets. And there's the germ of the problem.
The stories are often written up hurriedly by journalists who are not specialists, and who possibly do not know their ecological footprint from a hole in the ground - well, a hole in the ozone layer, at least.
They go to the press briefing, eat the prawn sandwiches, and take away the 400-word release, which they hastily copy up in time for their deadline. And when they do, they further accentuate the message of the famous research body's press secretary, namely that such and such a country was best and that some other usual suspect was worst.
And the readers read, the winners preen, the losers hastily send off a delegation to find out how it's supposed to be done, the ones in the middle say "at least we're not as bad as THEM", and nobody actually bothers to go and look at the study to see why country X was so good or so bad.
From the recent Finnish perspective, who cares anyway, as long as we keep winning?
But the almost grotesque difference between our performances on the Environmental Sustainability Index and the Living Planet Report made me stop and think.
And it made me READ the damned things. Was there something in the methodology? Are these lists worth the timber that gets felled to print them up, or the carbon dioxide and hot air they generate?
It turns out that our success on the ESI was almost predestined.
The makers say as much: "The five highest-ranking countries are Finland, Norway, Uruguay, Sweden, and Iceland - all countries that have substantial natural resource endowments and low population density".
We won because we are a nation with an advanced economy, a high level of exports of our major natural resource, a small population in the domestic market, and low vulnerability to exhausting our national treasure - the forests. So we'd have had to be rank nincompoops to fail.to impress in the rankings.
A glance across at the worst offenders in the WWF Living Planet Report - those countries exerting the heaviest ecological footprint - reveals some familiar names. No fewer than six of the top 15 ESI countries feature in the "worst 10" of the LPR.
And the reasons are precisely the same.
Countries that produce a commodity but export most of it - whether it be meat in New Zealand, fish in Norway, oil in the United Arab Emirates, or timber, pulp, and paper in Finland and Sweden - are going to get hit by the methodology in the WWF study.
As the small print of the WWF report reveals: "The resulting national footprints can be distorted, since the resources used and waste generated in making products for export are not fully documented. This affects the footprints of countries whose trade-flows are large relative to their overall economies. These misallocations, however, do not affect the total global Ecological Footprint."
Quite so. The WWF report itself indicates painfully clearly that we earthlings are all going to hell in a hand-basket because we are overfishing, cutting down too many trees to wrap stuff in, eating up too much arable land for grazing cattle or sheep, and because we are hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels.
We are living far beyond our means and Earth's resources are being used faster than they can be replaced. That is what really matters.
But is that how the average reader was informed over his or her breakfast egg? I fear not.
As the Yale/Columbia report noted: "Countries want to be seen as doing well in comparison to those similarly situated", and I suspect many people only gleaned that such and such a country was doing a bad bad thing, and that its people were stomping down on the planet with a heavy boot, taking four times or more what the globe's biocapacity can sustain.
The placing was all, especially in "small" countries like Finland, where there is an enduring obsession with what others think about us.
The big picture and the reasons behind the rankings, and the nature of those countries that are "similarly situated" - it is not necessarily all about GDP or level of development - were somehow secondary.
They were also secondary (or even downright irrelevant while we basked in the reflected glory) when Finland came top of the heap according to the Yale and Columbia scholars.
In effect, the dice were loaded in our favour in the first case, and the deck was pretty much stacked against us in the second.
I hope I am not alone in suffering from list fatigue.
Or that I'm the only one who takes these things with a large dose of salt, and peers behind the black and white of the headlines into the murky grey that is always going to be there.
But it probably doesn't really matter even if I am.
Just because Finland wins big in this or that comparison and gets royally stuffed in another is probably not going to affect most people's views of the country half as much as Lordi triumphing at the Eurovision Song Contest or even a funny-pages piece on a new sauna-endurance world record.
An English friend told me the other day that when he asked his mother what she thought about Finland, she did not praise our incorruptible civil servants, or applaud the outstanding numerical literacy of our secondary school students, nor did she even frown at our hob-nailed ecological boots.
No, bless her heart, what she replied was: "Good chocolate!".
So that's alright then.
At least until the World Confectionery Federation puts us down at #146 on the Global Chocolate Rankings.
Personally I blame David Wallechinsky and Irving and Amy Wallace. It's either them or the person who thought up Desert Island Discs for BBC Radio.
Wallechinsky and the Wallaces were the people who lifted list-making from the realm of the bar-room discussion and put it between the covers of a 1977 book called - unsurprisingly - The Book of Lists.
Until then, the passion for making lists was restricted to the mainly male inhabitants of public bars, who would wrestle with important questions like "Who was the best centre-forward never to play for his country?", "What are the five seminal rock albums from the past 40 years to have in your vinyl collection?", or "Which seven Hollywood babes would you wish to be stranded with on a desert island?".
After the book came out, it seems all hell broke loose. Now every organisation under the sun wants to rank countries. Apparently it is also a good means of raising awareness - and funds.
This past week was, for me at least, a list too far.
We Finns were told first that we were #1 in press freedom (hooray!), then we were soundly whipped for being the third-worst in the world for ecological profligacy (oops!), and finally we got the so-so news that we were the 6th happiest bunch on the planet, according to Business Week.
Huh? Happiness!? What the hell? When did THAT become scientifically measurable?
It is not as though this list-mania has not been going on for some time. Over the last couple of years, the collective Finnish ego has been massaged in all the right places by studies that have shown our superiority in things like competitiveness, lack of corruption, educational efficiency and PISA scores, and even environmental sustainability, in all of which we took top spot or at least got among the medals.
But hang on a second, what was that last one again?
Environmental sustainability? Oh yes, that was a measure of our excellence in the stewardship of our natural resources, courtesy of researchers at Yale and Columbia, in January 2005.
And yet the WWF Living Planet Report just last week caned us for being third only to the UAE and the United States in the size of our ecological footprint.
Good little Finland goes bad, or what?
Let's back up a little and consider the nature of these apparently ubiquitous global ranking exercises. They have become almost a sporting discipline. They do not appear in arcane journals like Global Ecologists' Monthly or Education Policy Quarterly or even the World Happiness Newsletter, but on the pages of mainstream tabloids and broadsheets. And there's the germ of the problem.
The stories are often written up hurriedly by journalists who are not specialists, and who possibly do not know their ecological footprint from a hole in the ground - well, a hole in the ozone layer, at least.
They go to the press briefing, eat the prawn sandwiches, and take away the 400-word release, which they hastily copy up in time for their deadline. And when they do, they further accentuate the message of the famous research body's press secretary, namely that such and such a country was best and that some other usual suspect was worst.
And the readers read, the winners preen, the losers hastily send off a delegation to find out how it's supposed to be done, the ones in the middle say "at least we're not as bad as THEM", and nobody actually bothers to go and look at the study to see why country X was so good or so bad.
From the recent Finnish perspective, who cares anyway, as long as we keep winning?
But the almost grotesque difference between our performances on the Environmental Sustainability Index and the Living Planet Report made me stop and think.
And it made me READ the damned things. Was there something in the methodology? Are these lists worth the timber that gets felled to print them up, or the carbon dioxide and hot air they generate?
It turns out that our success on the ESI was almost predestined.
The makers say as much: "The five highest-ranking countries are Finland, Norway, Uruguay, Sweden, and Iceland - all countries that have substantial natural resource endowments and low population density".
We won because we are a nation with an advanced economy, a high level of exports of our major natural resource, a small population in the domestic market, and low vulnerability to exhausting our national treasure - the forests. So we'd have had to be rank nincompoops to fail.to impress in the rankings.
A glance across at the worst offenders in the WWF Living Planet Report - those countries exerting the heaviest ecological footprint - reveals some familiar names. No fewer than six of the top 15 ESI countries feature in the "worst 10" of the LPR.
And the reasons are precisely the same.
Countries that produce a commodity but export most of it - whether it be meat in New Zealand, fish in Norway, oil in the United Arab Emirates, or timber, pulp, and paper in Finland and Sweden - are going to get hit by the methodology in the WWF study.
As the small print of the WWF report reveals: "The resulting national footprints can be distorted, since the resources used and waste generated in making products for export are not fully documented. This affects the footprints of countries whose trade-flows are large relative to their overall economies. These misallocations, however, do not affect the total global Ecological Footprint."
Quite so. The WWF report itself indicates painfully clearly that we earthlings are all going to hell in a hand-basket because we are overfishing, cutting down too many trees to wrap stuff in, eating up too much arable land for grazing cattle or sheep, and because we are hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels.
We are living far beyond our means and Earth's resources are being used faster than they can be replaced. That is what really matters.
But is that how the average reader was informed over his or her breakfast egg? I fear not.
As the Yale/Columbia report noted: "Countries want to be seen as doing well in comparison to those similarly situated", and I suspect many people only gleaned that such and such a country was doing a bad bad thing, and that its people were stomping down on the planet with a heavy boot, taking four times or more what the globe's biocapacity can sustain.
The placing was all, especially in "small" countries like Finland, where there is an enduring obsession with what others think about us.
The big picture and the reasons behind the rankings, and the nature of those countries that are "similarly situated" - it is not necessarily all about GDP or level of development - were somehow secondary.
They were also secondary (or even downright irrelevant while we basked in the reflected glory) when Finland came top of the heap according to the Yale and Columbia scholars.
In effect, the dice were loaded in our favour in the first case, and the deck was pretty much stacked against us in the second.
I hope I am not alone in suffering from list fatigue.
Or that I'm the only one who takes these things with a large dose of salt, and peers behind the black and white of the headlines into the murky grey that is always going to be there.
But it probably doesn't really matter even if I am.
Just because Finland wins big in this or that comparison and gets royally stuffed in another is probably not going to affect most people's views of the country half as much as Lordi triumphing at the Eurovision Song Contest or even a funny-pages piece on a new sauna-endurance world record.
An English friend told me the other day that when he asked his mother what she thought about Finland, she did not praise our incorruptible civil servants, or applaud the outstanding numerical literacy of our secondary school students, nor did she even frown at our hob-nailed ecological boots.
No, bless her heart, what she replied was: "Good chocolate!".
So that's alright then.
At least until the World Confectionery Federation puts us down at #146 on the Global Chocolate Rankings.
Helsingin Sanomat